The sky above Zephira bled into a faint gray, neither night nor morning, as though the city itself resisted the passage of time. For Reiji, dawn no longer symbolized renewal. It was a lie, a mask of light stretched thin over endless shadows.
He stood at the edge of the fractured balcony overlooking the sprawl below. Smoke rose from distant towers, fires still smoldering where the hunters and the Silent Court had clashed. The betrayal of the night before echoed inside him, each word from that figure carved deeper into his thoughts.
The Betrayer walks among you.
And worse—the Codex had agreed.
---
Reiji gripped the shard until his palm stung. The Codex's whispers hadn't stopped since the encounter. They pulsed like a heartbeat beneath his skin, threading treachery into every thought.
"You carry fragments of what I once bore," the Betrayer had said.
Reiji's reflection in the glass shards scattered around him looked nothing like the man he once knew. The shadows beneath his eyes, the faint tremor in his fingers, the haunted edge in his stare—it all spoke of someone already becoming what he swore to destroy.
---
Kael's voice broke the silence.
"You're walking their path."
Reiji turned sharply. The informant leaned against a broken column, pale and unsteady after the suffocating silence that had crushed him the night before. But his eyes burned with conviction.
"You saw it too, didn't you?" Kael pressed. "The Codex has already marked you. Every step you take… you're drifting closer."
Reiji's jaw clenched. "Then tell me this—if dawn itself lies, if the Codex twists truth until it breaks, what am I supposed to follow? Shadows? Chains? Your fear?"
Kael pushed himself upright, trembling but unyielding. "Not fear. Memory. The Betrayer wasn't born—they were made. Piece by piece. Each oath. Each silence. Until choice was no longer theirs to make."
Reiji swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth. The idea gnawed at him—that he wasn't in control, that the Codex was weaving him into a role written long before his time.
But the thought of surrendering to inevitability repulsed him even more.
---
A horn sounded in the distance, faint yet sharp, carrying across Zephira's broken streets. Reiji's head snapped toward it.
"The hunters," Kael muttered grimly. "They've begun their march again."
Reiji narrowed his gaze at the horizon, where the first light of dawn spread across the jagged skyline. But even that light felt false—cold, fragile, a veil stretched over the blood yet to be spilled.
"They move fast," Reiji said. "Too fast. Someone's guiding them."
Kael's silence was answer enough.
---
The two moved swiftly through the ruined corridors of the spire, descending into the streets below. The air was thick with ash and smoke, each step echoing like a drumbeat of inevitability.
But with every corner they turned, Reiji noticed it—the way the light of dawn never reached the ground. Towers blocked the sun, shadows clung unnaturally to walls, alleys twisted deeper than they should.
It wasn't just war staining the city. It was the Codex itself. Warping reality. Bending light.
Zephira was no longer just a city. It was a battlefield written in the Codex's ink.
---
At a crossroads, they stopped. The ground was littered with broken masks, gray-cloaked hunters who had fallen not to battle but to silence. Their bodies bore no wounds, their faces frozen in expressions of horror.
Kael whispered, "The Betrayer's hand…"
Reiji crouched, brushing his fingers against one of the shattered masks. A mark was burned into the ground beside the corpse—an intricate sigil in blood-red lines, spiraling like veins into the stone.
The shard inside him flared violently, recognition sparking through his chest. The Codex pulsed against the symbol, like a wound reopening.
It wasn't the hunters who killed each other. It was a command. Written into silence.
The Betrayer was still moving through the city, erasing obstacles, one shadow at a time.
---
"They're not fighting for victory anymore," Reiji murmured. "They're being rewritten."
Kael's eyes widened. "You mean…"
Reiji stood, his grip on his sword unshaking now. "The dawn isn't light. It's the rewriting of darkness. A new day, not because the sun rises, but because the Codex says it does."
The thought solidified into conviction. The Betrayer wasn't just someone who had turned away—they were someone who had wielded the Codex fully. And the same path was being carved beneath Reiji's feet.
---
The horn sounded again, closer now. Shadows surged along the street as hunters advanced in formation, their gray cloaks merging like a tide.
Kael's hand tightened on his dagger. "If they see you—"
"They already do," Reiji cut him off, stepping forward.
And he was right. From the mass of hunters, one figure broke away—taller, armored, the commander Reiji had seen once before in the fog of battle. His mask gleamed with silver streaks, his blade dripping with something darker than steel.
The commander's voice carried across the street. "Shinomiya Reiji. Shadow-walker. Fragment bearer. The Codex calls you traitor."
Reiji's blood turned to ice. Not because of the words, but because of the tone. The same calm certainty the Betrayer had spoken with.
The hunters weren't just following orders. They were following a script.
---
Reiji lifted his sword, its edge catching the false light of dawn. "Then let the Codex watch closely," he said through clenched teeth. "Because I don't follow its lies. Not now. Not ever."
The commander raised his blade. The hunters surged forward like a storm breaking its dam.
And above them, the false dawn stretched across the sky—crimson at its edges, shimmering as though ready to tear open.
It wasn't light that greeted Zephira that morning.
It was war.